3Q to the Artist

Three questions to Bartolomeu Santos

8 Jan 2026

About Bartolomeu Santos

Bartolomeu Santos (b. 1992, Lisbon) is a Lisbon-based artist who combines his artistic practice with the OSTRA curatorial project. The studio, as a space for work, thought, and experimentation, is a chaotic universe of relationships between things. His work is rooted in personal memory, using a wide range of media to merge objects and senses into a symbolic visual language.

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Your work often transforms everyday materials into sculptures, like sponges coated with epoxy. How do you choose these materials, and what draws you to them?

Most choices happened a long time ago intuitively. And after the intuition worked on whatever was on my brain, I started to think how to make it into something that lasts. Regarding sponges, I used them a lot while I painted. And one day in 2020 I arrived at the studio and saw 30 or 40 sponges on the floor, filled with paint; immediately thought “I want to show these”. I want to show what was the means to an end, and not just the end result - I never showed the original painting that ‘created’ the first sponges. It helped me deconstruct that an artwork is an object (or some dead end) - absolutely not, it’s quite the opposite, it’s something in between, something with energy, almost breathing and germinating new opportunities.

Your last exhibition at Espaço Cultural das Mercês was inspired by The Three Little Pigs. What interested you in this tale, and how did you translate it into your work?

First of all, I ‘removed’ the scary big bad wolf from the title of the exhibition. I say ‘removed’ because I didn’t really remove it... He will always be there, hidden. But I added ‘everybody else’. While I was reading and investigating the tale, I realised there are a lot of different interpretations and versions of it. And I understood that these pigs, and their houses, are fragments of our lives. We are the small pig, the medium pig, and the big pig, we are also the wolf. We have a small house made of straw, wood, and brick. We want to devour everything that crosses our way, and we get burned, or eaten. These characters are there, so we don’t confront ourselves too obviously, or too bluntly.

Ostra is a space for ‘artists and curators to have fun’, and you recently collaborated with Tiny Art Gallery from The Hague on a show of very small works. What do you feel is currently missing in the Portuguese art scene?

The Portuguese art scene is super creative, seething with talented artists ready to deliver new inputs, but lacks a stronger buying culture (from regular citizens, collectors, museums and even the Portuguese State). And then this influences everything. Studios are getting harder to find, further and further away, smaller and smaller... Getting back to the pigs, I think in Portugal, most people of my generation are struggling in the little straw house (and studio), and hope takes a long way home. There’s this culture of ‘pay to play’ which is super challenging to artists already struggling, and makes privileged people more ahead. And with time, you see a decay of ideas, and a decay in openness. I don’t want to seem too pessimistic; that’s one reason why I created OSTRA; OSTRA is fighting this tendency and is creating this space of opportunities.

For me, it means nothing if there are only 2 or 3 artists thriving. We need a lot of artists, a lot of visions, and we absolutely need disagreement and doubt. This conversation will end up in the importance of democracy, I guess.